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Interview With a SETI Astronomer
Siduri writes "We at Pigdog Journal conducted an interview with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, and I think it's pretty interesting. He talks about the technical details behind what SETI and SETI@home do (the two programs are very different), and he speculates about the nature of alien intelligence. He's also quite funny."
--Manuel
"I hate quotations, tell me what you think"
Tune in the Universe -- Amateur Radio and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
I read through (most) of the article (I just could not bear with all that "Well, you know..." so I didn't finish the whole thing, but I was suprised to not read about FRANK DRAKE and the DRAKE EQUATION. The Drake Equation is arguably the underlying force being the entire aim of SETI.
And, nicely pasted from E2, here is a good idea of what it is:
An equation used to estimate the number of technological civilizations that may exist in the galaxy. There is no exact answer to Frank Drake's famous equation, but it nonetheless a tool for the scientific community, and the force "behind every project at the SETI Institute."
N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
Where:
N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose radio emissions are detectable.
R* = The rate of formation of stars with a large enough "habitable zone" and long enough lifetime to be suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of Sun-like stars with planets is currently unknown, but evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.
ne = Number of earths per planetary system. All stars have a habitable zone where a planet would be able to maintain a temperature that would allow liquid water. A planet in the habitable zone could have the basic conditions for life as we know it.
fl = The fraction of those planets where life develops. Although a planet orbits in the habitable zone of a suitable star, other factors are necessary for life to arise. Thus, only a fraction of suitable planets will actually develop life.
fi = The fraction life sites where intelligence develops. Life on Earth began over 3.5 billion years ago. Intelligence took a long time to develop. On other life-bearing planets it may happen faster, it may take longer, or it may not develop at all.
fc = The fraction of planets where technology develops. The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations, i.e., technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time that communicative civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) will most likely discover either biology-based intelligence like our own, or an advanced form of machine-based Artificial Intelligence.
Alien civilizations conducting a similar search in the near future are likewise likely to find either us humans or the AI mind-species that succeeds us in the onwards march of Technological Singularity.
Along the lines of the SETI@home project. there is also a kind of AI@Home project to the extent that independent AI programmers have been creating Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA AI.
Whether we find Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or not has a bearing on the Theology of Artificial Intelligence, because if we find that we are not alone in the universe, we will have to re-think our ideas on our relationship to our Creator.
Seth has also written a series of articles on SETI, the most interesting of which to me was the one on the Fermi Paradox. If they're out there, theyve been out there for a LONG time...so why don't we see the astronomical equivalent of jet contrails from their warp drives? Any spacefaring civilization should be all over the Galaxy ... not just come by Earth. So where are they?
I thought the point of writing up an interview was to isolate the interesting information from all the [sigh] and [mumbles] and "well..." and " I think [uhm] maybe - well, if you look at it like this, it might be.."
Why was this terrible writeup ever posted? I couldn't bear to read more than half of it...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
if you look at the kind of signals that we're currently using, sort of spread-spectrum signals and things like that, they're very complicated, and they're completely unlike the kind of things we look for in SETI. The kind of things we look for in SETI are signals that are just what are called narrow-band signals, that are on one spot on the radio dial. [...] The advantage of that is that it makes it really easy to find the signal because all the energy is in a small band so it really stands out as a big spike of energy. Whereas if you spread it out over five megahertz, like a TV signal, then the energy's spread all over the band and it's very hard to find. But on the other hand, the actual signals that we use are spread out, more and more. And ET will be at least as advanced as we are, so you might say, "Well, why would they make those narrow-band signals?" And the answer is, probably: most of the time, they don't. [...] (but) there's lots of things that would have narrow-band components in the signal. So that's what we look for
Let's face it, if EM transmission goes the way of the Napoleonic Semaphore system, then we will not have a chance to intercept the new technology.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It would have been interesting get Seth's reaction to the growing rumors surrounding the discovery of a signal coming from EQ Pegasus a year or so ago.
For those who don't know what i'm talking about, the scientific comunity has been argueing about the "discovery" of an extraterrestrial signal comming from EQ Pegasus, a small binary system situated about 27 lightyears from Earth.
The signal capted by Paul Dore with a small radio-telescope was distributed to several observatories for analysis. Astronomers don't really know what to think about it. A press conference was scheduled, but it was cancelled due to threats from an unnamed source. There are rumors the Air Force was involved in silencing the guy who found it, starting some suspicion that it could have been a deep space probe, a CIA "Black" project, or similar. The signal would have been capted the October 22 & 23, which is some weeks after a powerfull Radio-Telescope from Arecibo would have picked a strange signal comming from EQ Pegasus in a project called Phoenix. Astronomers had concluded that it was just interference coming from a geosynchronous satellite.
The SETI program tried in vain to pick up the signal, and they said that this was either a big joke, or interference.
Makes you wonder.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Here's an another online chat/interview from 2 years ago conducted by ABCNews.com with the same guy.
A Chat with Seth Shostak: Listening for E.T.
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"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
Why would we want to find alien life in the universe?
Say we did find aliens. Then what? First no scientist would ever believe we actually found it. You'd have a situation where the world is flat instead of round because people see its flat.
So say you did prove somehow (if thats possible) that theres alien life via some radio signal, then what?
People never even stop to think what comes next if Seti ever did find alien life in the universe.
However I dont think Seti ever will and think its a waste of money, and if they ever did i dont think people would believe it because theres no way to prove it really is from an alien source and not something else.
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Seth has a very important point.
;-)
"...they look for Dyson spheres by looking for stars that have a lot of infrared. But you know, they've only looked a couple hundred stars."
"..So that was 1959 and by 1960 people were already looking for the signals."
"...So if you want to send a bit of information from here to Alpha Centauri it's cheaper, in terms of the energy, to do that with radio than to do it with light."
"So, you know, that's been the argument for many years. Now that argument isn't very solid anymore. "
That's a very insightful statement. Perhaps we are yet to discover yet another means of efficient mode of communication. Now suppose Earth were to try and make contact with another civilization, would we use smoke signals or radio?
Just imagine what would have happened if someone had transmitted a radio message just about 200 years ago? We do not even know if someone did.
Perhaps it is possible that some alien civilization has a much more efficient and better means of communication, and they are trying very hard to tell us something, but hey, would we know it even if we saw it?
Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something
And this is something we never even consider.
Why the hell would they be using radio when they have nano technology, and mind to mind communication via some more efficient technology via lasers, or Electro magnetic type technology, really why would they be using radio if they've been around for millions of years before us when we are using radio after not even a million years of being around.
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If we have stealth aircrafts which can bypass enemy radar, how do we know aliens dont have cloaking and arent flying around watching us right now?
I mean if they are so much more advanced, its not like we could detect them with our technology.
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But in the end, your review relies heavily on claims that you cannot possibly know to be true.
No. SETI researchers make no such assumptions. They certainly don't make many of the assumptions you've claimed they make. For example, you say that one of SETI's assumptions is that every planet that develops life will eventually develop an intelligent civilization. I know of no serious researchers who assume such a thing. In fact, the URL you listed to demonstrate this assumption says precisely the opposite.
You correctly claim that our own evolutionary history would indicate that intelligence such as ours is probably an unlikely development. But you incorrectly claim that "intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable." We only have a very few examples of intelligence, and not enough to make such a statement. Sure, brains are expensive, but judging from the success of mammals, they're a valuable investment. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the evolutionary paths of thousands of worlds, and compare them.
The rest of your review is based on several other unprovable assumptions:
- That the civilization will not invest the time or resources in contacting other worlds.
- That the energy requirements of a long-term project would be prohibitive.
- That most civilizations will self-destruct within a few centuries.
As to the first two, we don't know what energy technologies will be developed in the future, how committed a civilization might be to finding others, or how good a very advanced civilization would be at picking candidate planets to beam signals at.
For the third, I would dispute your claim that "We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already." Even in the event of a full nuclear exchange, the extinction of the human race would not be guaranteed (please see the scientific simulation, Fallout for further information). We could certainly survive if a major city was nuked every decade or so. In short, I think the long term survivability of the human race is higher than you claim. More importantly, since we have no prior data, you have a rather flimsy basis for making these claims.
This is part of what makes SETI research so valuable. Finding out how common other intelligence in the universe is tells us a lot about our own situation. Even if we did a complete, thorough search of the entire EM spectrum for ten thousand years and came up with nothing, we'd still have learned something valuable. We'd have learned that successful, intelligent species are very few and far between, and that it was even more important that we not screw things up.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
But as he says, we can't wait for some new kind of physics. What we have NOW for picking up signals from other starsystems is a bunch of radio telescopes and as far as we know the most likely kind of signal to look for is either a deliberate "here we are" kind of message or "leaked" stuff like our TV broadcasts that have strong carrier signals. Sure that leaves out a hell of a lot of potential signals to look for but SETI has a very limited budget - Colgate probably spends more a week marketing toothbrushes than SETI uses in a year - so they have to look for the most likely candidate with the resources they have.
As new tech become available to then such as the 1hT array in a few years they can widen the search from hundreds of stars to millions. If there is only one civilization in that search group that was broadcasting back when the light we see left their sun then there's a good chance we'll hear them.
What gets me though is that given the lifespan of the galaxy there's time enough for millions of technological civilizations to arise - but *not all at the same time*. It could be that there's only ever one or two radio capable species alive in the whole galaxy at any given time. Even if there are hundreds or thousands of civizations active right now each is trapped at the bottom of a relativistic-well: there could be a bunch of guys with tentacles a hundred lightyears away sending us a "hullloooo? HELLoooooo??" message *right now* but it'll be a hundred years before we get it. Shit, Alpha Centuri could have been beaming out "pings" for fifty years but gave up 4.35 years and one day before Marconi built the first radio. But coinidences do happen, and they are more likely when playing the odds so I am still caustiously optimistic.
Given all of this, as is pointed out in the interview, maybe what we should be looking for is not something transient like a radio broadcast or a laser pulse - but examples of stellar engineering that would be evident for millions or billions of years, Dyson Spheres or something. Though to my mind any civilization that can build a Dyson Sphere has probably discovered an energy source a lot better than solar - zero point energy or something, so there may not be a hell of a lot of Dyson Spehere out there.
I think I've posted this before, but I'll post it again.
,which means that no liveable planets could survive (the gas giants would toss them into the star, or more likely, out of the system).
I've long believed there are ETs out there for us to meet, but the truth is, if they're out there, I doubt highly that they're in our galaxy, which pretty much puts them entirely out of reach for any sort of contact, communication or otherwise.
I'm not going to post the link again 'cause I'm tired of posting it, but Scientific American ran a great article about 2 years ago about the chances for intelligent (and exploring) life in our galaxy, and the result is, if they existed, they would have colonized the entire galaxy by now. At least, statistics agree with that, and I believe in statistics.
At only a bit ahead of our current technology, it would only take 5 million years to colonize the entire galaxy, a blink of the eye in astronomical terms. Therefore, we're here, and nobody else has colonized. If they had, their fingerprints would be everywhere.
Nobody is more disappointed than I by this. I want to meet the ETs, but frankly, I just can't reasonably believe that they're there anymore (at least not in our galaxy).
There are also compelling arguments about the series of events that led to multi-cellular life and later intelligence on our own planet. Many of these were "accidents" or "luck".
You add to all this that the fact that every extrasolar system (save one), where we have found planets, they have gas giants in the "habitable zone", or between the "habitable zone" and the star
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think we're alone in this galaxy (with the exception of life that either has no interest in exploring, or a lesser intelligence than us).